How Challenge and Teaching Combine in Self-Development

In ‘Ego is the Enemy‘, Ryan Holiday exposes a method for self-development called the plus, minus and equal. “The mixed martial arts pioneer and multi – title champion Frank Shamrock has a system he trains fighters in that he calls plus, minus, and equal. Each fighter, to become great needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser who they can teach , and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against”

I find this idea of combining challenge, teaching and training a great idea in self-development.

I have the experience of how enriching teaching can be as it forces to order one’s knowledge and deliver it in a consistent manner, enriched by the questions of the trainees.

At the same time, looking upwards to someone stronger as a challenge is a great way to improve (this can be for specific skills only, as I find it difficult with time to have a role model covering all the skills I aspire to).

And having a sparing partner to exchange ideas and train on a regular basis is great too.

So, when do you adopt the plus, minus and equal rule in your personal development?

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How Developing Leadership in the Team is the Way to Success

Robin Sharma states: “The quickest way to build a superb business is to swiftly develop the leadership potential of every teammate.”

Developing an effective team is not just making sure the team works together as an integrated, effective manner. It is also to make sure that each team contributor behaves as a leader, and knows how to take leadership when a tricky, unexpected event occurs. This is particularly important in uncertain, complex situations

Developing the leadership capabilities of the people in the team is a major accountability point for the team leader. This means embracing some level of risk and failure as each team member goes through his leadership learning curve.

And as Jack Welsh writes, developing others becomes your prime responsibility when you make it to a management position.

When do you start developing leadership in your team?

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How Avoiding Failure is Much Easier Than Trying to be Successful

I found this sentence deep in a post by Valeria Maltoni, in a quote: “Avoiding failure is a heck of a lot easier than trying to be successful“. That’s quite a powerful and far-ranging statement! And the more I consider it the more powerful I find it.

People that seek to avoid failure at all cost won’t progress in life. It is only by embracing failure as a by-product of trying new things that progress can be achieved on a personal and professional level.

And there are quite many people that avoid failure as a way of life, embracing what appears to be the surest way in terms of employment of personal life.

Trying to be successful entails failure, and many failures. It is not a wish; in action this means getting a lot of hits.

Failure is messy, sometimes bloody. However it is the way to grow. Which one do you choose?

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How Our Endeavors Require Time and Patience to Develop

Seth Godin’s post ‘Low & Slow (vs. fear)‘ touched me because of his comparison with many of our creative endeavours with bread-making: it requires ferment and lots of time. Entrepreneurship requires time and can’t be rushed through.

“Much of the work we do as creators, as leaders, as people seeking to make change–it needs to ferment, to create character and tension and impact. And if we rush it, we get nothing worth very much.”

But the interesting part of the post is also about the flipside, related to procrastination: “Sometimes, we mistakenly believe that we’re building something that takes time, but what we’re actually doing is hiding. We stall and digress and cause distractions, not because the work needs us to, but because we’re afraid to ship”

He concludes: “Impatience can be a virtue if it causes us to leap through the fear that holds us back.” And at the same time we should be patient and let our endeavors ferment to deliver the best quality. That may be the most difficult contradiction of entrepreneurship.

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How the Most Productive Teams Are the Most Social

A very interesting book and very recommended as en eye-opener on the drawbacks of the increasing usage of algorithms in our societies is ‘Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy‘ by Cathy O’Neil.

She mentions a very interesting study: “A few years ago , MIT researchers analyzed the behavior of call center employees for Bank of America to find out why some teams were more productive than others. The researchers found , to their surprise , that the fastest and most efficient call center team was also the most social . These employees pooh – poohed the rules and gabbed much more than the others . And when all of the employees were encouraged to socialize more , call center productivity soared.” And algorithms to drive the work of people in the call center were not the prime factor for productivity.

In call centers like in complex project endeavors, I observe again and again that overall effectiveness and productivity is highly correlated with an effective, social team. How long will it take for this fact to permeate management culture?

Making sure a team develops into an effective team is the single best investment that can be done. It does not much, it requires leadership. When will this become mainstream?

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How I Believe That Building Slowly, On the Long Term, Is the Way

Following up on our post ‘How Entrepreneurship is Not a Rich Quick Scheme‘, I do believe in entrepreneurship building slowly, on the long term, the foundations of a new business, at least until there is such an adoption of their product that scaling becomes the main issue.

Like Richard Branson says, “there are no quick wins in business, it takes years to become an overnight success“. I am always amazed at how start-ups try to develop quicker than the natural development time of their product, boosted by substantial investments from rapacious investors.

It might be that I am excessively on the safe side, favoring minimum external investment and self-development (which is also a way to remain free), and that my ventures could benefit from some injection of cash to grow quicker. At the same time, I am a firm believer that new approaches and products need some time to get adopted and understood and that there is a limit to the speed of development, at least until they reach a stage of adoption where scaling becomes an issue.

I am interesting in building stuff of quality and that will be viable for the long term. It takes time and that’s normal. So let’s assume it and avoid again those ‘get rich’ scheme delusion.

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How Entrepreneurship is Not a Rich Quick Scheme

The entrepreneurial world is full of the delusion of the ‘quick success’ scheme, and many would-be entrepreneurs and investors are addicted to the ‘rich quick’ delusion. This creates behavioral problems and disappointed expectations.

Of course there are famous and visible examples of start-ups that have had stellar trajectories, but they represent less than a fraction of a percent of all the entrepreneurial initiatives.

In reality, entrepreneurship is tough hard work, week and week-ends, to build something new. It will take years to build something strong enough to be worth being re-sold. All of this in an uncertain context where it is not sure the organisation will still be around in a few months time.

And on the investor side, there is no guarantee that a start-up investment portfolio will be a rich quick scheme either. There will be more disappointments than successes, and disappointments will also happen earlier, with sometimes disastrous psychological consequences.

Entrepreneurship is not a rich quick scheme. It is another way to look at work with an objective to change the world. And in most cases, it will end in disappointment.

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How To Respond to Entrepreneurial Failure or Disillusion

As noted in a previous post ‘What Makes an Entrepreneur Different‘, embracing the work of doing things that might not work is an essential trait of the entrepreneur. That’s nice, but how should we respond when failure happens? When associates scream at each other seeing their investment disappear?

Failure does happen in the life an entrepreneur because we try things and statistically they won’t all work. And often at these occasions, the nice agreement with partners and shareholders suddenly becomes tense and difficult. It then requires a lot of emotional work to keep steady through the management of the tough moment.

Now that I have had some of these, I have decided to stick to some principles to drive my conduct in those moments. They are not applicable to everyone, but they are aligned with my values:

  • Anticipate failure to keep some reserves even when things don’t work. This means always accounting for the worst case, and making sure you react before all resources are exhausted to keep some margin for the response
  • Put people first. Find solutions for employees to keep their payroll running, even if that means for them doing other things than was planned. It helps being involved in a few other ventures to find some opportunities for them. If needed, find solutions outside through your network
  • Show commitment to finding a solution. Fleeing from the scene as an investor is not the solution. It might take years to recover from a business attempt that fails, but that is always possible. The priority is to stabilize the situation, so as to be able to assess it, learn from it, change what needs to be changed.
  • Demonstrate your commitment to the people and to stabilization if needed by putting in more money or buying out fleeing investors
  • Looking for a providential investor is not the solution. You will be in a weak negotiation position, who would invest in a failed venture, and you have other things to do (this does not apply, of course, to situations where the activity works but the start-up is short of cash runway).

There is always good learning and good stuff to learn from a failing company, and ways to recover by changing things. I believe it is important in any case to show a responsible behavior as an interested investor in particular to the people in the team who have often worked intensely during months.

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How to Treat the Response to Disappointment As A Training Ground

Leo Babauta came up with the concept of ‘Beautiful Practice Ground: The Secret to Training Your Mind‘. I like it very much. The concept is to use those disappointment moments where we did not manage to do what we committed to, such as a new behavior or habit, as a learning moment.

“This habitual way of responding to difficulty is actually what’s standing in [our] way. Training the mind to respond differently in this exact kind of situation is probably the most important training [we] could do.”

“When you notice yourself having difficulty — someone is frustrating you, you are disappointed in yourself, you’re procrastinating on a hard task or habit you’re trying to form, you’re feeling resentful or criticizing yourself — start to recognize this as your Beautiful Practice Ground. And see it as a wonderful opportunity to practice.”

It is an exceptionally fruitful viewpoint to see our frustrations, stresses and guilt feelings as learning opportunities. Let’s pause, breathe and see what we can learn from it – and change our response from there.

When to you start identifying those new training grounds?

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How People Buy Why You Do It, Not What You Do

Simon Sinek the author of the bestseller ‘Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action‘, writes: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe“.

I was initially a bit sceptical with this affirmation, and with time I see increasingly the value of it, specifically when one is in the business of selling services like I am. Our clients do bother somewhat on what we propose and our track record, but most of all they are sensitive to the fact that we have an intent, a mission, that is benevolent and powerful.

And in reality when we do selling, people buy the reason why we are in business, and they see how our mission unfolds as a permanent background in the services we provide. Keeping the mission, we can be very flexible about the means to reach it. The avowed mission and how we demonstrate our commitment to it is the key.

How clear are you with your mission? Is it broad and benevolent enough?

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How the Internet Currently Tries to get Smaller

Following up on our post ‘How Private Communities Compete With Open Social Networks‘, the strong-worded essay from The Verge ‘The year we wanted the internet to be smaller‘ provides another interesting viewpoint.

Tiredness and disappointment from Facebook, twitter and the web giants, their limitations and drawbacks, suspicion of political manipulation etc. push people away to test new, smaller networks. “We can see this longing for community — and specifically, the sort of small, weird communities that populated and defined the early internet — everywhere.” According to the essay, community email lists also reappear with a strong appeal to create small groups of like minded people.

I am convinced this is the expression of discontent on the way some of those social networks are behaving, and that eventually there will be some rules imposed from a regulatory perspective to resolve those issues. There will always be a balancing act between large global networks and smaller closed communities. We need both to respond to our needs, and both will continue to exist one way or the other.

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How Private Communities Compete With Open Social Networks

Since the beginning of internet there has been a tension between private communities and public social networks. Of course, Facebook and the likes have for a while given the advantage to public networks, but private communities now do come back strongly.

An excellent post by Steve Pavlina ‘The Rise of Private Communities‘ describes in much detail the advantages of private networks (in addition, he is in the coaching business where this type of networks offer probably an advantage when it comes to the quality of interaction).

There are benefits and drawbacks to the rise of private communities – although they also do apply to public social networks who do offer some similar features with some restrictions:

  • The advantage is a better interaction through a barrier to entry and a strong facilitation, which should make content much more relevant with less waste
  • The drawback is that the community might tend to close upon itself, and in the extreme develop its own delusions

Therefore, private communities and open networks will always remain complementary. They are tools that need to be used in the right way for the right purpose.

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